Everyone likes a good story. When Old Weather began transcribing the logs of 19th century Arctic explorers it soon became clear that the USS Jeannette’s story was a particularly good one. In 1879, destined for the North Pole, the USS Jeannette and a crew of 33 left San Francisco amid much celebration and rejoicing. 3 years later only 13 crew members returned.

(U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)

The story of the Jeannette is both epic and tragic. She was stuck in the grip of the ice floes for nearly two years before sinking as a result of being crushed by the ice. Then followed a 1,000 km trek across the ice. Eight crew members were killed in a storm and a further twelve died of starvation and cold. The story unfolded as the logs were transcribed. Before long it became clear that the logs also contained an unexpected resource. Night after night while imprisoned by the ice the crew of the Jeannette recorded their observations of the aurora. Volunteers took note and began posting these observations on the forum. Chris Scott from Solar Stormwatch realised that this might yield some interesting historical information and asked the volunteers to keep posting. After a few months there was quite a list. Historical auroral records are extremely valuable in providing a long term picture of solar activity and space weather and can lead to a better understanding of the processes involved. Having an interest in all things solar, especially Solar Stormwatch, and a fondness for a good spreadsheet I began collating all the aurora posts from the forum and it wasn’t long before Chris and I realised that there was some real science hidden in the Jeannette’s logs. Science which ought to be made public. Maybe we could write a paper.

The Jeannette’s Executive Officer, Lieutenant Charles Chipp carried out experiments whenever there was an auroral display and recorded his own observations together with readings from his galvanometers in a notebook that he intended to publish on his return. Lt. Chipp, however, was one of the twenty who didn’t survive the expedition but, incredibly, his notebook did and with Kevin Wood and Mark Mollan’s help it was located in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and was scanned for us to use.

Working with Chris Scott and a solar expert colleague of his, David Willis, I spent 2 years analysing the aurora data from the logs, crew members’ personal diaries and Lt Chipp’s notebook. We were surprised at the detail recorded and were able to examine the frequency, strength, direction and colour of the auroral displays as observed from the deck of the marooned ship. We also studied the effect of the lunar phase on the visibility of aurorae. With the help of records from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich we found instances of the auroral oval expanding equatorwards during great solar storms and found some evidence for auroral activity recurring at 27-day intervals implying that some active regions were surviving longer than one solar rotation. At a time when atmospheric science was in its infancy the crew of the Jeannette was doing a superb job of gathering valuable data.

As a volunteer citizen scientist, I am immensely proud that our paper has now been published in Astronomy and Geophysics the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. It’s been quite a ride – fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. I am especially pleased that some of Lt. Chipp’s data has finally seen the light of day albeit 135 years late and we’re hoping to have a closer look at his galvanometer readings eventually. There are ship’s logs from all the other Arctic explorers to examine too – Old Weather seems to have become Old Space Weather!

You’ll find the paper in Astronomy & Geophysics here. I hope you enjoy the read.

We’ve not quite finished the Jeannette, but thanks to the excellent work of gastcra, clewi, jill, and the crew, I have already been able to reconstruct her route. And for this ship, we can learn a lot from just the route, because she spent nearly two years drifting embedded in the sea-ice.

The Arctic ocean has winds and currents, so the sea-ice does not just advance and retreat with the seasons, it also moves about. To understand its movement, nowadays we use ice stations and ice drifters: These are groups of people, or more often just un-manned automatic instruments, that are placed on an ice-floe and drift with the ice for months or years, recording its movements and the weather at their location. From them, we’ve learned a lot about how the sea-ice works and changes.

Jeannette was effectively the first ice station. The video shows the route of the ship reconstructed from her logbook, together with a sea-ice field. We don’t have good sea-ice records for 1879 so I’ve used the sea-ice from exactly 100-years later (as we did for the Thetis). We need to remember that the sea-ice in 1879 would not have been the same as that in 1979, but the comparison does add poignancy to the story of the voyage: They were unlucky not to escape the ice in the autumn of 1880, and they came so close to reaching the seasonal melt region around the New Siberian Islands – another couple of weeks, and maybe they would have escaped.

Our records from Jeannette end on June 13th, 1881, when she was abandoned and sank. But her contribution to science did not end there. Wreckage from the ship continued drifting across the Arctic Ocean, and was recovered in Greenland; and that evidence helped inspire Fridtjof Nansen to build the Fram and undertake an even greater Arctic voyage.

In the evening we had a minstrel entertainment in the deck-house, somewhat improved over last year… The success of the evening, however, was Sharvell as a young lady, in an after-piece… A feature of the evening was presenting each guest, on entering, with a little button-hole bouquet of colored paper leaves… The jokes were of the usual order, some broad ones being inevitable… The most acceptable occurrence was the issue of a double ration of whiskey, with which, hot water, and sugar, we tried to be cheerful, and make Christmas Eve rather less dreary than many of our days now seem.

By December 1880 Jeannette had been stuck fast in the pack ice for well over a year, but Christmas Day was made as acceptable as possible by a good dinner.

And I think we may refer to our bills of fare with pardonable pride. Our mince pies were a work of art; though they were made from pemmican and flavored by a bottle of brandy, they were as delicate to the taste as if compounded from fresh beef from market. CHRISTMAS DINNER, 1880: the usual Saturday Soup, Roast Seal – Apple Jelly, Tongue, Macaroni, Tomatoes, Mince Pies, Plum Pudding, Figs, Raisins, Dates, Nuts, Candy, Chocolate and Coffee.

Reading these snippets from De Long’s journal from the Jeannette would strike a chord with any sailor. Christmas at sea seems much the same today – people still celebrate as best as they can even though they are far from home and hearth. The banquet remains the highlight of the holiday. But the work must go on, as the ship’s log shows: along with the note about the entertainment there are all the usual weather observations recorded. Considering the perilous journey the Jeannette logbooks endured from the Arctic ice to us, it is a miracle that these data still exist and can be used for science again, in new and powerful ways that De Long and his crew could not have imagined when they sledged these heavy volumes across the sea ice after the wreck of their ship, and then carried them on their backs to the cold Siberian shore.

Old Weather citizen-scientists are making the recovery and analysis of these hard-won data possible, while also getting to read the unedited stories from the Jeannette and many other ships in the new (and growing) Old Weather – Arctic fleet.

It’s not all about the shiny and the new – we should appreciate, also, the virtues of the classics: In particular classic oldWeather, our original and ongoing project to rescue data from the US Government Arctic logbooks, which has now transcribed more than three million (3,000,000) weather observations.

Of the Albatross (1884); leelhat and Hanibal94 were captains, with steeleye and jd570b and Zovacor, with 569 more. They brought 150,734 weather observations, rich in pressures, temperatures, and wind directions.

Of the Albatross (1890); hurlock and Ravendrop were captains, with p3nguin53 and listritz and 1049 more. They brought 62,931 weather observations.

Of the Albatross (1900); Danny252, hurlock and pommystuart were captains, with HHTime, JanetET-S and wendolk with 482 more. They brought 57,991 weather observations.

Of the Bear, veteran of many campaigns; lollia paolina, gastcra and Hanibal94 were captains, with DennisO, jil and pommystuart, with 410 more. They brought 349,015 weather observations

Of the Concord; pommystuart and gastcra were captains, with Hanibal94 and MAPurves, and 1207 more. They brought 380,191 weather observations.

Of the Corwin; gastcra, pommystuart and lollia paolina were captains, with but 24 more. They brought 9,588 weather observations.

Of the Jamestown (1844); kimma001 was captain, with gastcra and Zovacor and 92 more. They brought 83,533 weather observations.

Of the Jamestown (1866); leelhat, Hanibal94 and kimma001 were captains, with 445 more. They brought 128,922 weather observations.

Of the Jamestown (1879); lollia paolina was captain, with gastcra, LouisaEvers, smith7748 and 475 more. They brought 93,696 weather observations

Of the Jamestown (1886); leelhat was captain, with lollia paolina with 385 more. They brought 82,624 weather observations.

Of the Jeannette; gastcra, Clewi and jil were captains, with with 67 more. They brought 42,982 weather observations and much knowledge of the ice.

Of the Patterson; Hanibal94, gastcra and asterix135 were captains, with helenj, avastmh and 101 more. They brought 334,146 weather observations.

Of the Perry; leelhat and Hanibal94 were captains, with exim_202, elizabeth_s, and rbertin1068, with 427 more. They brought 7,352 weather observations.

Of the Pioneer; Hanibal94 was captain, with gastcra and helenj and 86 more. They sought out 182,586 weather observations.

Of the Rodgers; leelhat was captain, with Hanibal94, avastmh and 50 more. They saved 19,718 weather observations from the fire.

Of the Rush; lollia paolina was captain, with leelhat and researchib with 368 more. They carried 25,174 weather observations.

Of the Thetis; lollia paolina was captain, with jil, leelhat, KookyBird and 716 more. They brought 220,493 weather observations.

Of the first Unalga; Hanibal94 and propriome were captains, with gastcra and Caro, with 92 more. They brought 136,001 weather observations

Of the Second Unalga; Hanibal94 was captain, with gastcra, Caro, and 36 more. They brought 10,395 weather observations

Of the Vicksburg; leelhat and lollia paolina were captains, with 393 more. They brought 357,525 weather observations

Of the Yorktown; Lekiam and lollia paolina were captains, with gastcra with 737 more. They brought 279,546 weather observations

Of the Yukon; gastcra and Hanibal94 were captains, with 80 more. They brought 31,111 weather observations

Weather from a scout run of the 20th Century reanalysis, using the US oldWeather observations.

The observations we are recovering will have many uses, but one is clear – they will be assimilated into collective reconstructions of historical weather (reanalyses). We’ve done this already with the original set of Royal Navy ships, and now we are starting to use the US Arctic ship observations in the same way. Leading the way, again, is the 20th Century reanalysis (we are working on nineteenth century records at the moment, but it’s too late to change the name now); the video above shows a new reconstruction of the weather for 1880 and 1881, and stars three of our ships (red dots) Jeannette, Corwin, and Rodgers. As well as the wind (vectors), temperature (colours), sea-ice, rain (black shading), and observations used (dots), it shows grey fog masking the areas where the reconstruction is still very uncertain (because there are no observations there – yet).

The improvement from our new observations can be seen clearly in the gaps in the fog surrounding each red dot, but the effect can be seen even more starkly if we follow one ship:

Observations from the arctic voyage of the USS Jeannette.

The map shows the route of the ship and the sea-ice for the period. The graph shows sea-level pressure, and near-surface air temperature, as observed by the ship (red dots), as reconstructed by 20CR version 2c (not using the ship’s observations: light grey band), and as reconstructed by a scout version of 20CR assimilating the Jeannette’s pressure observations (dark grey band – starts in Nov. 1879). Small yellow dots mark the other observations available to the reanalyses. The narrowing of the band indicates a reduction in our uncertainty about the weather – an increase in the value of the reconstruction.

So far we’ve only captured those three ships, but we’ll get to the rest – their observations and historical distinctiveness will be added to our reconstructions. Resistance is futile.

I’m looking at the moment at the Arctic ships we’ve finished: Bear, Corwin, Jeannette, Manning, Rush, Rodgers, Unalga II, and Yukon have each had all of their logbook pages read by three people; so it’s time to add their records to the global climate databases and start using them in weather reconstructions. From them we have recovered 43 ship-years of hourly observations – more than 125,000 observations concentrating on the marginal sea-ice zones in Baffin Bay and the Bering Strait – an enormous addition to our observational records.

The video above shows the movements of this fleet (compressed into a single year). They may occasionally choose to winter in San Pedro or Honolulu, but every summer they are back up against the ice – making observations exactly where we want them most.

So in our last two years of work, we’ve completed the recovery of 43-ship years of logbooks, and actually we’ve done much more than that: The eight completed ships shown here make up only about 25% of the 1.5 million transcriptions we’ve done so far. So this group is only a taster – there’s three times as much more material already in the pipeline.

We launched oldWeather three years ago today (October 12th, 2010). It was an exciting but scary moment – would she float? We’d done everything we could, but you’re never quite sure until the splash has settled.

One thing we did know at launch was where we were going: The map of past climate variability and change contains some very large blank areas – great expanses of space and time where we knew almost nothing of what the weather had done. Ours was a voyage of exploration: We would sail, via the archives, into these regions and rescue their weather observations, adding systematically and permanently to the scientific records on which our understanding of the climate is based.

But our primary aim is still the weather, and we’ve recovered an enormous account of historical weather information, more than 1.6 million new observations from our original set of Royal Navy logs alone. These new basic observations are a permanent foundation on which scientists all over the world can build new reconstructions and products, and today we can see such a building appear.

The weather. The reanalysis calculates everything about the weather: winds, temperatures, clouds, rainfall, the jet stream, … but I can’t show all that in one video so we’re only seeing mean-sea-level-pressure. The solid black contours show where this is low (bad weather), and the dashed contours where it is high (good weather).

The observations. Grey dots mark observations we’ve had since before oldWeather started. Yellow dots mark new observations. Most (but not quite all) new observations are from oldWeather. (We are only part of a wider recovery program).

The fog of ignorance. Grey fog marks the areas where we still don’t have enough observations to say exactly what the weather was doing.

The glow of discovery. Yellow highlighting marks the areas where the reconstruction is much better than it was before (mostly because of our new observations).

That’s a lot to get in one image, but it’s the yellow that matters. Our work has cleared the fog, and illuminated the weather, over a huge area of land and ocean. The improvement stretches over about 20% of the Earth’s surface – more than 100 million square kilometres – and is there for every hour of the 9+ years covered by the Royal Navy logs we read.

Most of the project participants live too far from Washington to attend (I phoned in, to help answer questions, but it’s not the same). However we were ably represented by Kathy Wendolkowsky and Kevin Wood, who explained to a fascinated audience of dignitaries and members of the press, what we are doing, why it’s important, and why it’s fun.

The Archivist and the Head of NOAA both spoke at the event, here’s what they said:

I was on a research ship in the Arctic Ocean for two weeks this Summer and I’m working hard to get reoriented with current activity on Old Weather.

Among the most interesting things we brought back from this cruise are recordings of “the devil’s symphony” of unearthly sounds created by the movement of the Arctic ice pack. You will undoubtedly read about these sounds in some of the logbooks. Here is a typical description from In the Lena Delta by George Melville, chief engineer of the USS Jeannette:

It was in one of these oppressive intervals succeeding a gale, when the roar and crash of distant masses could be distinctly heard, that the floe in which the Jeannette was imbedded began splitting in all directions. The placid and almost level surface of the ice suddenly heaved and swelled into great hills, buzzing and wheezing dolefully. Giant blocks pitched and rolled as though controlled by invisible hands, and vast compressing bodies shrieked a shrill and horrible song that curdled the blood. On came the frozen waves, nearer and nearer. Seams ran and rattled across them with a thundering boom, while silent and awestruck we watched their terrible progress.

The recordings in this video “Winter Sounds of Arctic Sea Ice” video were captured last winter by hydrophones deployed in the Bering Strait by Dr. Kate Stafford of the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. The undersea instrument moorings were located just north of the Diomede Islands (marked on the satellite image of the Bering Strait region below).

Looking at this example it is easy to imagine how these sounds might be produced. Just days before this image was retrieved on April 2nd, 2012, the ice pack north of Bering Strait was apparently one solid mass. In the course of a single day this long channel of moving ice formed and began marching to the southward into the Bering Sea, crashing into the Diomede Islands along the way. (You can also see how the northerly winds are opening the ice along the southern coasts, and some cool cloud streets forming over the relatively warm water of Norton Sound).

I look forward to getting back up to speed. Already our team at the U.S. National Archives is readying a new shipment of logbook images. These will be coming here to the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory for pre-processing (cropping, color balancing and other adjustments) before we transfer them to Zooniverse to get tee’d up for Old Weather.

Kevin.

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This is the blog for the Zooniverse's Old Weather project. Visit the main site at oldweather.org or find out more about the Zooniverse at zooniverse.org.